A fictional history rooted in a meeting of the minds of two of the greatest folk heroes of India’s resistance to British occupation, RRR is what some might call historical fanfic with a budget. But what a reductive way to go through life, and what a tragic lens with which to view art? Director S.S. Rajamouli (Baahubali: The Beginning and The Conclusion) is as gifted with the Super Soaker approach to film as he is with the ice-pick method — there’s no cinematic tradition he’s not versed in, and that fact has helped increase awareness for this truly special film in North America beyond the Indian diaspora and film freaks of all types.
Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) are both well-known icons of the anti-Raj movement. Their incarnations in this film — the former a forest warrior aiming to rescue a child hostage, the latter a police officer continually colliding with the racism of colonial power structures — aim to cover all emotional bases as their lives become entwined and political repression grows, with rebellion fomenting in the streets and forests throughout occupied India. Tensions are high, and something’s got to give.
It’s an outline that Western audiences could almost take as one of their own. But even working from the same outline, you’d never find a mainstream American film this politically radical or so skilled at blending all genres together to create something that scratches all aesthetic itches without feeling the slightest bit mercenary in motivation. Indian cinema is so much more than just what gets shorthandedly referred to as “Bollywood” in Western media. Each of the Indian languages has its own regional cinema, and they’re all fascinating with their own unique facets. Even here in Nashville there are at least two or three Indian films (sometimes as many as five) playing most weeks in town, often at the Hollywood 27, with Hindi-, Tamil- and Telugu-language films amply represented (and sometimes Kannada and Malayalam as well). You just have to pay attention; and if you love film, you really should.
RRR blends the virtual and the actual with a comparable sense of spectacle; it doesn’t feel like something that could be made in one of Atlanta’s greenscreen-enclosed lots, even as Rajamouli could take on any of Marvel’s hired guns and thrash them soundly. His 2012 film Eega was about a man who must avenge his own murder in the body of the fly he’s been reincarnated as, and that’s the kind of imaginative, high-concept art that should be easy for the Hollywood apparatus to make happen. But it does not. Because Rajamouli believes in the big emotions — all of them.
Bheem and Raju, both in chaste and respectful relationships with supportive women, must therefore channel their live-wire energy for societal liberation into something else. Thus their adventures, intricate dance battle, innovative hand-to-hand combat (Thunderdome style!) and palpable dread of being betrayed play with a little extra oomph for queer viewers even as they maintain aspirational romance for family audiences. Though there’s certainly a streak of peplum vibes to be found (think about what Dr. Frank-N-Furter meant when he talked about “an old Steve Reeves movie” and you’ll get the drift) — machismo weathering torment and righting wrongs, lots of muscular feats and sweaty endurance beneath the lash. Though Bheem and Raju are based on real-life figures, they’ve also got Herculean and super-cop archetypes in respective abundance, all things to all audiences.
About that dance number: “Naatu Naatu” may very well be the best musical sequence in the past couple of decades. It’s a great song, and the dancing and staging are spectacular. But it also builds character in a way that informs and electrifies, and it’s carrying on a dialogue with the past century of cinema and the way that nonwhite culture (and joy) are represented. In the U.S. alone, it was the tradition for decades to have scenes in which Black people would show up, wipe the floor with the ostensible white protagonists in tap — or Lindy hopping, or any of many forms of dance and ecstatic ritual — and then exit the film before the reel change, making it easy for skittish exhibitors to excise any display of nonwhite excellence completely.
RRR, in addition to being a historical epic, political drama, action spectacle and bromantic telenovela, is a film that engages with history on its own terms. This isn’t a case of Tollywood aiming for Western wallets. The nationwide encore of RRR is American audiences reaching with outstretched arms to something so exciting and rock-solid entertaining that its success already happened without insular traditional media even mentioning it. This isn’t America dipping a toe in Indian cinema — it’s a victory lap.
